Fall of Adam
by The-MarmaladeCat1
Summary: The day they introduced Cain to Lilith, the world suddenly made sense.


For Herit. :)

Set many centuries pre-series

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Cain understands that he is different.

He came to such an understanding by a series of slow revelations, unexpected lights warming into existence and bringing with them moments of clear-sightedness so crystalline they were almost physical.

It started with being alone. It _always _started with being alone. It was when that state of solitude; that blissful, perfect comprehension of the world and his place within it, met the resistance of other people's views, other people's imprints on the world, that he began to see himself as _apart_.

His ideals do not mesh with the understanding of other people. He can feel their incomprehension; their pallid, domesticated acceptance of their own inferiority and it disturbs him. He finds such ignorant acceptance, that voluntary blindness, astounding. At first he was amazed. Then he was disgusted. Finally, he made up his mind. Perhaps Humanity had, even in ignorance, retained a hope until that point.

When they introduced Cain to his siblings he had been relieved beyond words. The relief of discovering other minds that shared his same awareness of the universe had been a reaffirmation of his own self-image. It had been liberating.

His brother Abel was an inverted reflection of his own mental image of self, his face full of the wrath that Cain finds slips through his fingers and away like so much smoke. He does not experience the fury and despair that his brother feels, and is not sure, even up to this very day, the exact reasoning behind the other man's unthinking cruelty. After all, cruelty can be wielded like a weapon, and Cain never wields a weapon unless it is with finesse.

The girl-child, Seth, is a delight to him with her tiny features and cold intellect. He suspects that she may even be slightly more intelligent than him, though she lacks the ability to grasp the broader picture as he does. Her mind is obsessed with the acute details and the minutia of her studies which will forever limit her unless she learns to overcome her self-imposed restrictions. Also, she fears him, which he finds amusing and somewhat charming.

The last of them, the eldest of them all, is the woman Lillith. She is the fulcrum upon which all their existences turn. Everything, in the end, comes back to her. He used to believe that they were meant for each other, destined to complement each other's particular strengths (for neither of them have any particular _weaknesses_) and produce from their combined genetic code a new race of superior humans. That was a long time ago however, and the world has moved on since then. Now Cain looks only to the future he has laid out for this dreary planet so full of drowsy cattle and empires fallen under the weight of their own corruption. He sees fire and death and flames that burn away the chaff to soot and ash. In this picture there is no Lillith.

He does not recall the exact moment at which she left them, and for all that he searches his memories he cannot pinpoint the instant in which he first knew. He suspects that the process was a slow one, a subtle undermining of her faculties until the poison of the planet had crept into every part of her body, threading its way through her mind and her blood and settling itself in the core of her brain where it slept like a cancer.

He saw the canker of it behind her eyes when she looked at them both, he and his raging, half-crazy brother, and heard it under her breath like a taint when she declared them both her enemies.

Truly, he could not at first comprehend it. Even with the forewarning of his suspicions, to hear those words from the lips of such a paragon of intelligence and beauty, of perfection, was inconceivable. He looked upon the woman whom he had regarded as an equal, or possibly even in his quietest, most thoughtful moments, as a better, and he wondered when she had left them. His eyes had been upon her all this time, but then he had looked away for moment and when he looked back she was already gone.

He had loved her for the perfection she had lent their pantheon. Her grace and her strength and her wisdom. But when she turned away from the grand vision held by his siblings and himself; when she fell, weakened by the entirely inadequate philosophies of an inferior race of humans, then Cain being at once both the strongest of those remaining and also the one possessed of true clarity of vision, had been forced to act. Oh they had waged war against her, and she had shown them all the magnificent strength of will and intelligence she possessed and she had almost, _almost _prevailed. It would have been tragic after all, he considers, had she done anything other than fight with perfect grace.

It was his love for her that forced his hand. He could not bear the tarnishing of her mind by the weak philosophies of the under races. They would have been gods after all, and no god should be a slave to the whims of its underlings. She became the splintered fracture in their vision and in the end she had to be terminated.

He had lost her to the imperfections of a lesser people. Her vision and her beauty squandered upon a race of cattle who had not the faculties to comprehend the magnitude of the blood sacrifice they had caused to be shed in the name of mercy. He does not think that they deserve mercy. For the crime of shattering the perfection of his queen he does not think that they deserve anything except to feed the flames of his Armageddon.

In wake of their history he can do nothing less than set a light to the putrescence of this rotting planet and watch the purifying flames spread. He hopes that her soul, that unstained portion of her mind which must be left now that he has sent her far away from the taint of humanity, is able to look down upon them all and watch as he sets a torch to the world.

After all, he is burning it in her name.


End file.
